A conversation about the complexity and challenges of the dark side of occupations

With greater international recognition that people do things so diverse in their forms and contexts – many that challenge the pervasive belief in the relationship between occupation, health, and wellbeing – the dark side of occupation is timely to consider and illuminate. As members of a global occupational therapy community, we are accountable for our decisions and associated actions - we should be able to describe the rationale for our decisions and actions to the people we work with and for. Together, we must work to better understand people, the complexity of the things they need, want, or have to do, their motivations, and the factors that influence, create, and compound their diverse lived experiences. Occupations of individuals within communities are diverse, temporal, and culturally defined. Our occupational therapy community will now and, in the future, confront occupations that challenge personally and professionally held values. The conceptualisation of the dark side of occupation was always intended to trigger and encourage discourses, practice, education and research endeavours to extend the scope of occupational therapy to engage with a broader range of occupations. In this chapter we provide our own perspectives, through dialogue between us, on how this might occur.